Out at Five is the continuation of a story that started away back in 2002 with a web comic called Cortland. Today, it’s the story of a farm girl named Angie and a city boy named Crispin who met in Omaha, got married, and are soon going to be starting a family. And if you just started reading it (on November 14, 2019), that’s really all you need to know.

Cortland

The story began with Cortland, however, which was a comic about a young man named Terry who loved Macintosh computers. He had a job at a shabby little print shop in Lincoln, Nebraska with his friends Angie and Todd. Together, they had a number of adventures working together as well as fighting a cast of science-fiction super-villains based on people in the real-life computer world, specifically an iCEO named Steve.

Out at Five

Terry Cortland disappeared at the end of his comic, and a new comic started with Out at Five. This was the story of a mundane business in the middle of Omaha, run by a fairly incompetent man and the rag-tag group of underlings who put up with him. The title came from a “business model” conceived by Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, in his book The Dilbert Principle. Many of the same characters from Cortland returned for this comic, including Angie, Todd, and Brody, along with their boss Chad. There were other new characters as well, and the format of the comic was more similar to a daily Dilbert-style comic strip.

Five Years Later

My comic, and all of its characters, went on hiatus in 2011, as the business they worked for went bankrupt in the comic and they all found themselves out of a job. The story picked up again five years later, and we catch up with the cast of characters over dinner to find out what they’ve been up to all this time. You can start reading from that point on here.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

A new story started up in April 2017 and focuses on Weed, a character who appeared in my previous comics Cortland and Forumies, but never Out at Five. The story is mostly told in flashback about what he’s been doing since disappearing from my comic around ten years ago.

1996

The following year brought a prequel that takes place in the summer of 1996. This set of stories gives us a peek at some of the characters from Cortland and establishes the setting where that story picks up years later. This story ends more or less where Cortland began before bringing us back to “present day,” which is where the comic is set now.